


Eyes Open (Mind Awake)

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Gore, Keith has insomnia, Keith suffers from ptsd, Nightmares, Suicide Attempt, basically angst, broganes, not explicit but enough to make some people uncomfortable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 10:51:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16217525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ever since Keith Kogane woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of his phone ringing and the woman on the phone told him his brother had been run over by a drunk driver on his way home from work three years ago, he hasn’t really been able to sleep all that well.(this is not a sheith fic, sorry!)





	Eyes Open (Mind Awake)

**Author's Note:**

> This work heavily mentions symptoms and feelings of anxiety, depression, ptsd, and insomnia. It references a suicide attempt and a brief mention of purposeful self harm. this is the first time I've written something a bit darker like this so please tread carefully but most importantly, read safely.

Ever since Keith Kogane woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of his phone ringing and a man named Michael telling him his brother had been run over by a drunk driver on his way home from work three years ago he hasn’t really been able to sleep all that well.

 

So, like, initially?

He just, ya know, brushes it off. Labeling it as like, stress and normal teenage anxiety or whatever. Because after all, Shiro survives the accident. He’s a tough mother fucker who refuses to leave Keith alone, all he lost, really, was his arm, and even then! He has a prosthetic now and he gained a wicked scar across the bridge of his nose so it’s more of a win than a loss if you ask Shiro, whose childhood dream was to be a tragic anime hero with a wicked backstory. But when the lack of sleep continues into Keith’s gap year after graduation, and at Shiro’s insistence he decides to invest in sleepy tea and other sorts of home therapy. He tries all the listening to music, massages, acupuncture, the list goes on. But he somehow develops a fear of needles, the tea just makes him get up to pee more than necessary, the diffuser makes too much noise, and getting touched by a stranger with slimy lotion hands isn't all that pleasant for him.

 

So like, all of that ends up being pretty fucking useless, so he ends up going to the pharmacist in his neighborhood and the dude basically tosses some melatonin at him and says “knock yourself out kid,” chuckling before heading out the employee exit for his afternoon smoke. Keith tries it, squints at the little blue pills a little skeptically before shrugging, and taking the dosage as prescribed.

It works!

For a little while at least, until that shit doesn’t work anymore either, and he’s starting to get a little antsy. The nights just keep rolling by and he isn’t really sleeping. He's just barely shutting down at 4:00 AM just to wake right up again three or four hours later. Night time when you're awake is really fucking long, and there isn’t much else to do besides pick at your fingernails, and pick and _pick_ , and oh _fuck_ , okay, pick until they’re bleeding. So you switch gears. Mess around with the knives in the kitchen that are most definitely not for playing with, and it’s not until one night where Keith gets a little reckless and gives himself a huge gash down the side of his face that carves down to his jaw and a bit of his neck, does he let Shiro ship him off to a shrink.

 

Of course, that poor old lady is all “Omigosh” and “Poor little boy” and “needs serious professional help Mr. "Sir"” so he starts seeing some lanky thirty year old therapist who spends more time on his phone than his clients files, until he convinces everyone, including Shiro, that he’s better.

 

So yeah.

But that was fucking bullshit as per usual.

 

Three months later after his sessions end, Keith takes his good ol’ local pharmacist’s advice and knocks himself out with multiple doses of some almost expired melatonin and gets sent to the hospital in August of 2017. He is, at this time, nineteen years old. On that night at around 4:27 in the morning Keith’s eyes open to the hospital room he is in and he catches a glimpse of Shiro, sleeping in the uncomfortable plastic chair provided, with his prosthetic on the floor next to him murmuring in his sleep. At first it’s just dream state bullshit, like Cheetos are chasing his dog away, and Keith would almost laugh if he could figure out how his mouth works, that is, because it feels absent and numb under the presence of the medication he has been put on, until suddenly Shiro's sleepy face scrunches up and a tears drips from his closed eyes as he shifts a little and mumbles; “Mom he tried to kill himself...” and as something wet rolls down his own cheek Keith decides that he’ll never pull that shit again.

 

And surprisingly he doesn’t. He stays clean of cuts and bruises, and has minimal amounts of knives in his house, even if he does get tempted to throw them from time to time. He gets up from his bed at 6:00 every morning and goes on runs until he has trouble walking without trembling from his exhaustion, and _then_ he goes home. _Then_ he showers, and goes to the Shell by his house to pump people's gas and wipe their windshields tirelessly until its seven at night and he goes home. _Then_ , he calls Shiro, and _then_ he puts on sleep clothes, and watches a movie, and _then_ , goes to bed and lays awake in bed thinking of what he can do to fall asleep.

 

And when 4:30 rolls around it is only _the_ _n_ he is able to shut his eyes, but even that is short lived.

Just a moment afterwards, he is thrown from sleep at the sight of Shiro's mangled, amputated arm, crawling up his bed, and the thing is reaching, the thing is _reaching up_ to grab Keith’s neck in a choke hold and he can’t breathe, his windpipe is cut off, and he’s scrambling to get it off but the thing is a titanium collar on his neck, and; _please_ Shiro, _stop_ , I can’t _breathe_.

 

Sometimes he sees the flash of headlights in his window through the blinds, and suddenly all he can smell is gasoline stuffing itself like cotton balls down his nostrils until he feels the urge to vomit, and he should be able to hear Shostakovitch from the little radio on his nightstand, a string quartet performing vibratos and sweet violin melodies in his head but all he can hear is the incessant _tick tick tick tick tick tick_ of Shiro’s bicycle tire, that was left turning, turning, _turning_ for all eternity on that street, right where it had fallen. The thing is painted red, but it shouldn't be red, Shiro’s bike was painted black by Keith when he was fifteen and listening to MCR, but Shiro never painted over it, it’s just red with Shiro’s blood.

 

Keith sometimes turns over in his bed and sees Shiro whispering in his mother’s gray, dead, utterly rotten corpse ear. He’s saying something so softly that Keith has to focus hard to catch it, “He almost killed himself, mom” like a six year old tattling on a classmate, and whenever Keith tries to cover his ears or ignore it, Shiro starts screaming it out at the top of his lungs until it’s just TV static roaring in his ears while the rest of the world explodes.

 

Some nights, he’ll hear a phone ringing, and in his dream he’ll get up to go answer it, but when he picks up the phone? It just keeps ringing, and the ringing keeps going, louder and louder and _louder_ no matter how many times Keith hangs up or sobs out a hello, until he grabs a knife out of nowhere and slices the phone wire but then he feels like he can’t stop, and he stuffs the blade into the phone itself like it’s tenderloin, and the phone is bleeding black blood all over his hands, he tries to get it off by wiping it on his clothes but it won't come off, it wont come _off_ , _why the fuck won't it come off_. But the phone is still ringing so Keith picks up the knife and points the blade to his abdomen _and_ -

 

Keith jolts up in bed. He’s crying, and sweaty, and he runs his hands through his sweat soaked hair. Once, twice. He looks up at the clock. It is six in the morning. He gets up, puts on his sneakers. He goes on his run.

 

Keith Kogane is an orphan with a physically disabled brother. He tried to kill himself almost a year ago. He is twenty years old. And yeah, he has a little trouble sleeping.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope that you enjoyed and if you did, let me know. Or if you didn't, let me know anyway in the comments! 
> 
> I might continue this as a multi chapter fic with plot and ships and angst and everything but probably only if anyone actually likes it lol.
> 
> Questions, concerns, conundrums just let me know and I'll respond when I can. 
> 
> Come and bother me on Tumblr @lao-medeia


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